The gloss menagerie

His father's novel Catch 22 exposed the insanity of America at war. Now Ted Heller's written his own savage send up of the world of US magazines. But there's just one question on the lips of the New York slick set: who did he base his characters on?

Ted Heller presents an incongruous figure in New York's Times Square, rather as though he were a technician who had ambled on to the wrong side of the camera and been press-ganged into taking part in the sort of television game show your friends wouldn't admit to watching. Perhaps even worse, Ted the technician has won a prize. "My life has gone crazy," he says, hands deep in pockets amid the animated gaudiness of the brashest location on Earth, sports bars competing for attention with the flicker and throb of come-ons for must-haves, everything cancelling out everything else in the electronic playpen. "I'm beginning to regret it."

It is, of course, his own fault. Anyone who chooses to write a roman à clef ("I am very tired of that phrase") about the magazine world must expect to have his book used as the text for games of Spot the Gilded Condé Nast Scribe.

The steel, glass and monumental brick home of the Condé Nast magazine empire is just around the corner from the vulgar business end of Times Square, an aloof rebuke to the sort of open-to-the-street establishment where Heller labours for Viacom, a beacon for hordes of teenagers because it contains the MTV studios. "There is nothing interesting about my life." Well, there is the fact that he is the son of the late Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, but Ted is not about to discuss that. "I don't deny it. I didn't change my name or anything, but that is something I refuse to exploit." And he says he will throw the tape recorder against the wall if anyone tries to discuss his father.

"A week ago nobody wanted to talk to me," he says. But now that his first published novel is in the shops, everyone wants to, and they all want to know the same things. Which one of the book's character's is Anna Wintour, editor of US Vogue? Is that Tina Brown, editor of the recently launched Talk? "I have this character Leslie Usher-Soames and I've just seen this piece where someone says I based her on Emma Soames [editor of the Telegraph magazine]. I'd never heard of Emma Soames before. It's a little upsetting."

It is true that Heller's book, Slab Rat, reads like an insider's account of the nepotism, prejudice, bitterness, ambition, rivalry and hatreds of the magazine world. But it is true, also, that he picked up his material operating as something of a peripheral. "I don't remember saying, 'I'm going to base this fictional person on that real person.' I don't know if people believe me. I would think that I was lying, too. But I can see why people would say 'That's Anna Wintour' or 'That's Tina Brown.' I don't think I have the power to hurt Anna Wintour's feelings and, believe it or not, she doesn't give a shit about me." He says he invented British characters for the book only because it would not have been accurate otherwise.

Slab Rat - slab as in midtown Manhattan skyscraper, rat as in someone who works in it - could barely have received more positive reviews, and was not damaged by the assumption that the writer is one of the slick set. The Ted Heller in Times Square is dressed mostly in standard-issue Manhattan black, it is true, though somehow the colour fails to make any sort of tribal statement when applied to his frame.

Heller did not research his skewering of the glossies by joining Wintour for her daily, overpriced lean beefburger. Nor did he hothouse buzz-phrases with Brown when she was editor of Vanity Fair or the New Yorker, prior to launching Talk, home of The American Conversation. He was more likely to have been searching out an elusive transparency with one hand and clutching half a sandwich in the other.

Heller, who has between five and 10 unpublished novels on the stocks, spent most of his 20s in the fashion industry, though his involvement was not quite as glamorous as it might sound. His presence was not required, for instance, in the front row facing the catwalk during New York Fashion Week. But someone had to do the fetching and the carrying, the lifting and the pushing, and Heller was that man. The author was into his 30s - he is 43 now - by the time he arrived in magazines, the door opened by a friend who worked at the now-deceased satirical publication Spy. Here he met the co-founder Kurt Andersen, one of New York's cleverest media figures, author of last year's Turn of the Century and now co-chairman of an internet company: "He laid me off. I don't know what year it was but it was January 17, so every January 17 a few of us get together and have a drink. I wouldn't put a bullet in his brain for laying me off. Not in his brain. Then I was at Vanity Fair for two weeks, standing in for someone who was off having a sex-change."

Then came Premiere and more photo research. "Details: that was very unpleasant. I can't tell you how happy I am that no one at Details remembers me. The only time anyone ever noticed me was to yell. I asked someone, 'Who makes Jeep?' and he just yelled at me, 'Jeep makes Jeep.' It's hard to yell at someone using so few letters."

Heller's reconstruction of this precious world - where words such as faux, manqué and wunderkind are common currency - is pitch perfect, but the book is full of cynical observations that might have a universal application: "This can be a problem with people under 25 years of age; not having that much experience under their belts, they just don't have that much to dislike, which means they don't have that much to talk about."

He says he is not really all that interested in magazines. "I think this story could happen anywhere. I know it does. In any job, there's someone who someone wants to kill. I think you're lucky if there's only one person you want to kill."

Much of Slab Rat was put together in London. Two or three times a year, Heller would check into a bed and breakfast in Paddington for a week and spend his days writing at libraries in Notting Hill and on the Brompton Road. This went on for five years and the writer does have an affection for the place: the Kinks song Waterloo Sunset would be one of his desert island discs and he is flattered by comparisons to Nick Hornby. But that is not why he went there to work. "I don't know anyone who lives in London. Not one person. I went there because I didn't have any distractions."

Distractions such as the publicity machine he finds so distasteful. "They'll never get me on a radio programme. I heard Michael Jordan tell the same joke three times when he launched his cosmetics range." And yet the attention has brought with it compensations: "Graydon Carter, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair . . . this shows you how interesting my life is. Last Saturday night I was sitting at home doing the Times crossword puzzle. He called me from a restaurant to tell me how much he liked the book. That's how much of a social life I have. I wanted to call people to tell them, but no one was at home because it was Saturday night. I had to wait until Sunday."

A few days later, he got another call, this time from Gregory Mosher, former director of the Lincoln Center Theater and one of the producers of The Dead on Broadway. "He called me at work." Work for the past six years has been the children's magazine Nickelodeon, where Heller is picture editor/senior writer and where, he would like it known, the people are great. "I'm counting slides on the floor and the phone goes and it's Mosher. We ended up quoting lines from Glengarry Glen Ross at each other. There was some interest there for a movie. I would love to quit magazine work."